


Sherlock As Pierrot

by Tendergingergirl



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BBC Sherlock - Freeform, Commedia Del Arte, Doyle Family Legacy, Early Incarnations of Punch, Italian Performance History, Literary Intertext, pierrot - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-26 17:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17750738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tendergingergirl/pseuds/Tendergingergirl
Summary: October 17, 2016





	Sherlock As Pierrot

##  **Continuing the question asked in the[Clair De Lune ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17423873/chapters/41019134)thread, here is a look at a powerful character, reincarnated many times, over the centuries.**

  
 

**Pierrot…** is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of _Pierre_ (Peter), via the suffix _-ot._ **His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin.** Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse… **The defining characteristic of Pierrot is his naïveté: he is seen as a fool, often the butt of pranks, yet nonetheless trusting….** For Jules Janin and Théophile Gautier, **Pierrot was not a fool but an avatar of the post-Revolutionary People, struggling, sometimes tragically, to secure a place in the bourgeois world**. And subsequent artistic/cultural movements found him equally amenable to their cause: **the Decadents turned him, like themselves, into a disillusioned disciple of Schopenhauer, a foe of Woman and of callow idealism; the Symbolists saw him as a lonely fellow-sufferer, crucified upon the rood of soulful sensitivity, his only friend the distant moon**

****** **

thxs [@tjlcisthenewsexy](https://tmblr.co/m3cKRztnGlO63H-1PJU-5YA) for this!!

… **Pierrot became an alter-ego of the artist, specifically of the famously alienated artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His physical insularity; his poignant lapses into mutism, the legacy of the great mime Deburau; his white face and costume, suggesting not only innocence but the pallor of the dead;**

**his often frustrated pursuit of Columbine, coupled with his never-to-be-vanquished unworldly naïveté—all conspired to lift him out of the circumscribed world of the Commedia dell'Arte and into the larger realm of myth.**

The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. **He was the naïve butt of practical jokes and amorous scheming (Gautier); the prankish but innocent waif (Banville, Verlaine, Willette); the narcissistic dreamer clutching at the moon, which could symbolize many things, from spiritual perfection to death (Giraud, Laforgue, Willette, Dowson); the frail, neurasthenic, often doom-ridden soul (Richepin, Beardsley)**

 

 the androgynous and unholy creature of corruption (Richepin, Wedekind); **the madcap master of chaos** (the Hanlon-Lees); **the purveyor of hearty and wholesome fun** (the English pier Pierrots)—and various combinations of these. Like the earlier masks of Commedia dell’Arte, Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere ( **So would Sherlock Holmes, coincidentally..or not** ) This, from a lecture on [_Sherlock Holmes and Moderism_](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.crimeculture.com%2F359%2FHolmes.htm&t=ZWM0NmRlMWJlZDcwYWQ3MDFkNWJkN2QzZmZiNjk3NjUxNGMxZDNlYyxvRklMdjVXOA%3D%3D&b=t%3A99US-dd59KEFK-T_oX2E5Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Ftendergingergirl.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F151922389531%2Fsherlock-as-pierrot&m=1):

_Holmes isn’t just a scientific rationalist.  He’s also in important respects a strange and eccentric individual - given to atonal violin playing, taking cocaine, aloof, bohemian and eccentric, capable of becoming so absorbed in the hunt for clues that he strikes Watson as a man transformed ‘from the thinker and logician of Baker Street’ into someone seized with 'animal lust for the chase’ - his face darkening, his brows drawn into two 'hard, black lines’, his eyes shining with a 'steely glitter’.  What all of these things suggest, of course, is a man marked out from the common run of mankind - whether by mental powers or by sheer individuality and purposeful energy. **The bourgeois world that Holmes is contemplating (via the hat) is something he’s completely apart from - superior in his powers, detached by his eccentric habits and his compulsion to discover the truth.**_

**Interesting note:** **With respect to **poetry** , _T. S. Eliot’s_ “breakthrough work”, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915),** **owed its existence to the poems of _Jules Laforgue_ ,** **whose _“ton 'pierrot”_  informed all of Eliot’s early poetry.  _Benedict stated years ago that he memorized the entirety of Prufrock by heart._**

**Learn more about Pierrot.[source](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FPierrot&t=MTQyYmZkNTg2NjE0OGYzZTdmMzRhYzY3ZjZkNzc0NGRmYTYxMjBlMyxvRklMdjVXOA%3D%3D&b=t%3A99US-dd59KEFK-T_oX2E5Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Ftendergingergirl.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F151922389531%2Fsherlock-as-pierrot&m=1) He is quite the character. I say ‘is’ because just like Sherlock, he never goes away for long.**


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